This is another of those round up type affairs that we sometimes do where we share a few things that have made an impression on us in recent weeks, it usually ends up being nothing but a list of records and reading and I’m afraid to say that this one ain’t no different. It’s all good stuff though so stick with it.
Music has been rewarding of late, whether it’s stuff that we’ve been working on or simply getting our kicks from, it’s been an exciting time. The record label that Andrew and I are involved in has been lively, with a band called Temples releasing their technicolour debut LP into a world that seems to have been waiting for them to come along. And as reported on here a week or so ago, someone we’ve worked with forever, Jimi Goodwin, singer/ co-founder of Doves, is about to release his debut solo effort on our label, and very good it is too. Jimi is headlining the Caught by the River stage at Port Eliot in the Summer. Here’s where I seize the opportunity to re-post this picture of Jimi with Chris Yates taken at Port Eliot a few years back.
Otherwise, life’s been lived to a dreamy, droney, mostly electronic soundtrack of late, with old faves Pye Corner Audio releasing the brilliant Black Mill Tapes 3 & 4 (Type Recordings) and Simon Fisher Turner’s soundtrack to The Epic of Everest (Mute) plus a great new LP from Mark McGuire called Along The Way (Dead Oceans) on heavy rotation.
The New English Landscape: Ken Worpole reviews Soft Estate, a book by Edward Chell, published by the Bluecoat.
“Chell’s exhibition and book alerts us to new forms of cultivated (and occasionally sacralised) landscapes which have emerged almost by default, but now form part of the new English countryside.”
Tales of the City: Melissa Harrison visits the Fen country:
I do all right in London, but I leave the city and I feel ignorant. We drove to the fens yesterday where the birds were unfamiliar: a kingfisher, yes, and a heron; greenfinches and goldfinches and the usual robins and tits; collared doves, grebes, coots, mallards; two lovely green woodpeckers, a skylark in faint song and a stag-headed oak full of roosting and heraldic cormorants – but what are all those waterfowl on the mere, and those, and those, and those?
Floodlines: Theo Pike rounds up links to the most rational think pieces on the subject of the current floods and water management in the UK.
Bob Dylan on the Studs Terkel Radio Show, 1963:
“a young folk poet who you might say looks like Huckleberry Finn, if he lived in the 20th century. His name is Bob Dylan.”
(via Open Culture)
On the BBC iPlayer – I Love This Dirty Town: First transmitted in 1969, this personal plea from Margaret Drabble is a lament for the death of the city as planners create endless suburbia instead of cities fit to live in.
Kathleen Jamie reads from “The Hvalsalen” in Sightlines: